This is part three of the Charles Odegaard Lecture, delivered at the 27th National Conference on Primary Health Care Access, April 6, 2016
The VA is an example of how quality
can be and is compromised when public sector funding is cut. In the area of
public health, it can have an even greater impact, and no fewer apologists.
When, under cost-cutting mandates from the state of Michigan the city of Flint
changed its water supply from treated Lake Huron water to the
industrially-polluted Flint River, the complaints of citizens were ignored.
When concerned health care providers, like Dr. Mona Hanna-Atisha (pictured), raised warnings about rising lead levels in the
children of that city, she was attacked and vilified. But she was right and
they were wrong, or, perhaps worse, lying. Poisoning our children to save
money. If individual health care is jeopardized when those responsible are
being rewarded for cost-cutting, we can do a truly impressive job of harm when
we destroy the public health infrastructure. And let us not forget that a major
reason this was able to happen was Racism; that they were not “our” children,
at least not those of the state authorities.
We need more emphasis on quality.
Indeed, quality, not cost-cutting, needs to be our primary metric. Spending
less should only be acceptable when quality is not negatively impacted. I
realize that this is also subject to interpretation; “quality” has almost as
many different interpretations as “waste”, and is frequently (if, hopefully,
usually unconsciously) associated with “what benefits me”. I am talking about health care that is of benefit to most
people, and is considered basic – keeping patients clean and out of their own filth,
feeding them, treating the diseases that we know how to treat, doing surgery
when it is of clear benefit, not having excessive waits for specialty care that
compromise outcomes. And, most importantly, not providing financial incentives
for limiting care. From a cost-cutting point of view, money is fungible,
whether it comes from ‘cutting the fat’ or cutting needed care; but from a
healthcare point of view, there is a big difference. (I refer to healthcare
here as “caring for people’s health”, not the industry of the same name!)
This is the big issue, and it is
amazing to me that it sometimes seems like such a mystery. If most of our
incentives are to cut costs, to keep our jobs or to make bonuses or to keep our
agency functioning, costs will be cut. Even when those cuts negatively affect
quality, in real and dramatic ways. The argument for privatization goes
something like “the private sector can do it better because, motivated by the
opportunity to make profit, they will discover efficiencies that government
employees do not, and run a ‘leaner ship’”. The problem is that, while there
may be some examples of this happening, what usually happens is that costs are
cut by cutting services, and making off with the profit, or bonus. The ship is made lean by cannibalizing its
parts, and the only thing which is certain to be maintained in fine working
order is the lifeboat in which the parties responsible hope to escape in while
the rest sinks. This scenario is repeated over and over again, whether services
are actually provided by private and for-profit organizations (think drug
companies, insurance companies, nursing homes, and increasingly hospitals) or
whether “private sector incentives” are built into publicly provided services,
as in England at Mid-Staffordshire, or, increasingly, in the US in Medicare.
Profit may not be a great incentive
to provide better health care, and is an uncertain to very poor guarantee of
quality, but it is an excellent incentive to generating profit. Think of drug
companies like Turing and its former CEO, Martin Shkreli, the poster child for unfettered
greed, and his 5000% increase in the price of pyrimethamine, or of Valeant, the
Canadian pharmaceutical company that recently doubled the price of secobarbital,
an 80 year old barbiturate, in anticipation of California’s assisted suicide
law. Think of the increase in price of colchicine, a drug that was used (in its
plant form) to treat gout in ancient Egypt 3500 years ago, from 10 cents to $5
a pill when the FDA “encouraged” its manufacturer to conduct new studies and
banned the generic (finally reversed last year, with generic colchicine again
available.) Think of the insurance companies whose profit was baked into the
ACA, making it costly and still not covering everyone. The ACP has recently
called for government controls on drug pricing. The fact is that you can’t
count on private for-profits to provide quality, unless you really trust Martin
Shkreli.
Interestingly,
in contrast to the Triple Aim advocates, critics of Sen. Bernie Sanders’
proposal for National Health Insurance system, Medicare for All, assert his
math must be wrong, that we couldn’t both save money and deliver quality health
care to everyone. (The Chicago Tribune editorial endorsing no one in the
Democratic primary says: “Sanders first
amused Americans who know their fiscal math with proposals for free college
tuition, expanded Social Security, $1 trillion in infrastructure spending,
"Medicare for all" .... The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible
Federal Budget calculates that his economic plans would push the top federal
tax rate to about 77 percent”).[1]
(By the way, they really mean the top
marginal federal tax rate, which was, for the record, 90% when I took
civics in junior high.) I don’t know if they are disingenuous or purposely
befogging the issue, since it is clear that every other developed country
delivers care to all its people for, usually, 1/3-1/2 of what we spend per
capita in the US, with much better outcomes by most or nearly all measures.
So why are cost
estimates in the US so high, when other developed countries do it for so much
less? A great deal of it is that profit is built into the system. When we read
about the problems of our system, we hear from insurers, who think providers
charge too much, and providers, who think insurers pays too little, and each
with an army to try to get what it wants. It is not because we care too much
about patients. In Canada, there is a single payer national health insurance
program (called “Medicare”) where the government pays the bills for largely
privately-delivered care. The fact that it is private delivered is part of why
their costs have risen second only to ours, but there is some central control.
In Switzerland, there are multiple payers, insurance companies that are,
however, forced to charge the same amount and provide the same basket of
services, and be non-profit. How do they compete then? Why, on service to their
patients! What an incredible idea! If you call your company to complain and
can’t get through, you switch to another! As long as our system is predicated
on building in excessive profit for providers, insurers, and drug companies, it
will be fantastically expensive, albeit a full-employment program for those
people trained to try to get bills paid and, on the other side, to deny
payment. And it will be about cutting costs, not improving quality.
